


Never Grow Up

by fardareismai



Category: Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: F/M, Tumblr Prompt, fraser's ridge era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 08:57:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18913711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fardareismai/pseuds/fardareismai
Summary: From the Tumblr prompt "Jamie x Claire, things you said when you thought you lost me"





	Never Grow Up

**Author's Note:**

> A Tumblr prompt moving to AO3

“If you’re dead, Jamie Fraser, I’m going to stomp on your corpse,” I muttered, shoving branches and brambles aside as I climbed the hill.  “And if you’re not dead, I might just kill you.”

I had told him not to go out, the fool.  His leg was still too weak to bear the kind of walking he’d wanted to do, but stubborn as he was, I could not convince him not to.

I remembered him as a young man: proud and stubborn and trying to prove to himself that he wasn’t as broken as we had feared- leaving the Abbey of Sainte Anne de Beaupre to walk in the snow half naked.

“You are too old for this now,” I raged into the muffling snow of the mountain.  “You know better.  I  _thought_ you had better sense.”

That was entirely untrue, in fact.  I knew as well as most women that a certain type of man scarcely ages past twenty or so.  Their bodies continue to grow, but their sense of danger and self-preservation remains ever that of a young man.

Jamie had gone off with Roger.  They had promised me they would be back before tea time, but they had broken that promise.  I’d never honestly expected them to keep it.

However, as the sun was beginning to gild the top of the mountain, Roger had returned, but Jamie had not been with them.

“He’d started to tire and said that I should go ahead,” Roger had said with an apologetic shrug.

“And you  _let_ him?”

Roger had given me a look then that said “and what was I to do, exactly?”

For all he was a MacKenzie and a Scot, Roger’s own native stubbornness could never have held out against Jamie’s, and if Jamie had wanted him gone, Roger would have gone.

I continued to wait for my husband for another hour, but when he didn’t appear, I decided that was quite enough, and if the mountain would not come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain.

I made it to the place that Roger said he had left Jamie- on a rock beside the Green Spring above the house.

He was there, sitting huddled in his cloak, looking out over the valley.

“Are you alive?” I asked, more mildly than I felt.

“Och aye, though some of my parts might never recover,” he said, not turning around.  “Aren’t you cold, Sassenach.”

In point of fact, I was cold.  I had not bothered to change into proper shoes for trudging the mountain in the snow, and my toes were numb, and I had no coat on, just my own cloak pulled tight around myself.

“Come here and let me warm you, mo nighean donn.”

He opened his cloak and I moved in to sit on his knee so that he could wrap his arms and his cloak around me.

“Why are you here?” I asked quietly against his shoulder.

“It’s quiet here,” he answered.  “There’s healing of the body, as well you know, but I needed some healing of the soul as well.”

“You worried me.”

The laugh was so deep inside his chest that if I hadn’t had my ear pressed against him, I would not have heard it.

“Worrit?  Aye?  And it wasna cursing my name that you were doing all the way up the path then?”

I did not respond to that.  “Are you hungry, Jamie?”  I knew he must be.

“Aye.  Just a moment more, and then we can go down to supper and you can feed me bread and milk in punishment, mo cridhe.  Just one more moment.”


End file.
